Ron Paul: We are already over the fiscal cliff

As House Speaker John Boehner looks to make a deal on taxes and spending with President Obama and Senate Democrats, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who is nearing the end of his congressional career, explained yesterday that the United States is already over the so-called “fiscal cliff”:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) warned Thursday that House leaders lacked “credibility” on the looming negotiations over tax rates and budget cuts, arguing that his colleagues were refusing to acknowledge “the truth … that we are broke.”

“I do not think I have heard the answer,” Paul told Bloomberg TV. “They talk about this fiscal cliff, but in my mind I work with the assumption we are already over the cliff, we’re just wondering how we’re going to land … it is unsolvable because you have to cut spending.”

Paul also noted that there is opportunity to form a coalition between “progressives and “conservative libertarians” to get the nation back on sustainable fiscal path through tax reform and spending cuts.

To Paul’s larger point on the fiscal cliff, he’s right. Anything we do is delaying the inevitable. House Republicans are not going the kind of tax reform we want (more on that in another post later), so dealing with congressional Democrats seems kind of pointless other than to give an appearance that they’re “doing something.”

Tax reform is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic unless House Republicans back down from their incredibly stubborn resistance to cut defense spending and manage to get substantive entitlement reform.